Stars and Snow

Messiaen’s “Canyons,” and Abrahamsen’s “let me tell you.”

Messiaen’s “From the Canyons to the Stars . . .” takes inspiration from the rock formations, birdsong, and night sky of Utah.

Illustration by Robert G. Fresson

Radicalism is relative. By the nineteen-fifties, the dissonances that had seared the ears of concertgoers before the First World War had become the lingua franca of international modernism. As music moved toward maximum complexity, composers in various countries rebelled against the rebellion, reclaiming elemental harmonies. The most famous gesture of simplification came in 1964, in the form of Terry Riley’s “In C,” a founding work of minimalism. In the same period, Henryk Górecki, in Poland, and Arvo Pärt, in Estonia, began to deploy ancient-sounding tonality in a sacred context. And in Denmark composers who had assembled under the banner “New Simplicity” treated major and minor triads as found objects—beautiful debris amid the sonic ruins.

No composer reclaimed triads more brazenly than Olivier Messiaen, the devoutly Catholic French master. After the Second World War, Messiaen formed links to the European vanguard, and taught three of its chief practitioners—Boulez, Stockhausen, and Xenakis. In the sixties, though, he swerved back to the eccentric, vivid tonality that marked the music of his youth. Explosions of E major cap his gigantic choral-orchestral piece “The Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ” (1965-69). And “Zion Park and the Celestial City,” the final movement of “From the Canyons to the Stars . . .” (1971-74), dwells for a short eternity on a hyper-luminous chord of A major. What makes it unlike any A-major chord in history is the noise that wells up within it: clanging bells, bellowing gongs, an upward-glissandoing horn, the sandy rattle of a geophone (a drum filled with lead pellets). This supreme consonance seems less to banish dissonance than to subsume it.

“Canyons,” which takes inspiration from the rock formations, birdsong, and night sky of Utah, has become a cult work of twentieth-century music. Its peculiar instrumentation has discouraged frequent performances: to program it, you need a virtuoso pianist, a first-rate French-horn player, tireless wind and brass, and a vast battery of percussion. Nonetheless, five recordings of the piece are in circulation, and in the first three months of this year it will have appeared on programs in half a dozen different cities, from San Diego to Sydney. Much of this activity is courtesy of the St. Louis Symphony, which recently presented “Canyons” in its home town and then took the work to the West Coast. I heard it at Disney Hall, in Los Angeles, which was nearly packed for the occasion.

Not every listener is prepared to embrace ninety minutes of geological, ornithological, and astronomical tone-painting. The St. Louis offered, as a guide to the uninitiated, a visual essay by the Berkeley photographer Deborah O’Grady, combining stills and video that she had shot in Utah and Death Valley. As towers of rock loomed on a screen behind the orchestra, O’Grady created the mirage of a performance in the canyons themselves.

The images did more than illustrate; they paid heed to the religious ramifications of Messiaen’s design. The third movement, “What Is Written in the Stars . . . ,” alludes to the writing on the wall in the Book of Daniel. (“Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.”) O’Grady here interposed glimpses of humanity’s invasion of the landscape: ribbons of highway, power lines, graffiti-covered structures. Messiaen’s severe gestures came across as a divine reprimand.

More often, though, we were pulled into a pristine natural world. In one sequence, a full moon rose slowly over an outcrop as Roger Kaza, St. Louis’s principal horn player, performed the sixth movement, “Interstellar Call,” which is a horn solo. Kaza knows this music well: in 1982, he brought his horn on a rafting trip on the Colorado River and played “Interstellar Call” in a branch of the Grand Canyon. He sent a tape to Messiaen, who was touched by the gesture but said that the tempo was too fast. Kaza’s rendition at Disney, slow and lyrically pulsing, would surely have made the composer happy.

David Robertson, the St. Louis’s music director, shaped “Canyons” with a sure hand. He quelled any suspicion that the work is indulgent or rambling; at the same time, he respected Messiaen’s meditativeness, his silences. The orchestra responded with playing of focus and fire. Peter Henderson was an incisive piano soloist.

More Messiaen will be heard in coming months. In early March, Esa-Pekka Salonen presides over a Messiaen Week at the New York Philharmonic, with the riotous “Turangalîla Symphony” as the centerpiece. In the fall, Gustavo Dudamel will lead the Simón Bolívar Symphony in “Turangalîla” at Carnegie Hall, and this spring Dudamel will take O’Grady’s “Canyons” project to London, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. This Messiaen wave, unmotivated by any anniversary, suggests that the composer is destined to be the next Mahler—a cult figure who becomes a repertory staple.

The Danish composers of the New Simplicity movement—Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, Henning Christiansen, and Ib Nørholm—have received less attention than many of their tonal-leaning counterparts, perhaps because their music is too restless to induce the collective trance associated with minimalism. In Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s unnerving orchestral piece “Symphony, Antiphony” (1977), familiar sounds—D-major arpeggios, Mahlerian string laments, bits of ragtime piano—are presented in jumbled fashion, like snapshots and clippings in a Rauschenberg combine.

Following in the wake of that vanguard is Hans Abrahamsen, who, at the age of sixty-three, has won the international renown that largely eluded his older Danish colleagues. His song cycle “let me tell you” had its première at the Berlin Philharmonic, in 2013, and has since been played by ten other ensembles, including the Cleveland Orchestra, which brought it to Carnegie Hall in January. The audience responded with one of the longest, warmest ovations for a new work I’ve ever witnessed. Doubtless this reception was due in part to the glowing voice and aura of the soprano Barbara Hannigan, who has sung all performances to date (and has made a recording of the work, for the Winter & Winter label). Ultimately, though, it is Abrahamsen’s score that causes thousands of people to stop breathing for a long moment.

The cycle is a setting of texts by the critic and novelist Paul Griffiths. They are drawn from Griffiths’s novel “let me tell you,” which constructs a portrait of Shakespeare’s Ophelia from the four-hundred-and-eighty-three-word vocabulary that the character is given in “Hamlet.” In the Abrahamsen, the sequence begins, “Let me tell you how it was. I know I can do this.” Like the text, the music exudes a shadowy simplicity: it begins in the area of B-flat minor, but this is a fragile, unstable tonality, undercut by extraneous notes (a D-natural here, an E-natural there) and bracketed by eerie instrumentation (piercing piccolos above, rumbling trombones below). Dynamics are generally subdued, and the singer keeps stretching syllables over repeated notes, to quavery effect.

Abrahamsen is drawn to winter imagery: one of his major works is the hour-long instrumental cycle “Schnee,” or “Snow.” Suitably, “let me tell you” ends in a blizzard: “The snow flowers are all like each other / and I cannot keep my eyes on one.” As the voice hovers ethereally, the orchestra lapses into late-Romantic harmony, with suspended chords reminiscent of the finale of Mahler’s Ninth. But they are blurred by discrepancies of tuning: standard temperament is set against natural harmonics, so that each chord bleeds around the edges. This “broken tonality,” to quote the score, only compounds the frigid beauty of the scene.

At the end, the music seems on the verge of resolving to G major, but an apparent transitional chord proves to be the last, its notes dropping out one by one. Underneath is the noise of paper being scraped on a bass drum—“like walking in the snow,” the composer says. At Carnegie, there was a profound silence, and then the ovation began. ♦